A Little Catching Up

We are alive and well, even though it's been a while since the last blog post from me. I've hit a bit of writers block and since I've been doing school work with Jack that has taken some of my extra time that I typically found for blogging.

A little school update. We are in our 8th week of homeschooling and Jack loves it! He asks on a daily basis if he gets to do school work. A week or so ago we sat down and looked back through all the work he has done so far. He was so proud and could not stop smiling. It was sweet.

I'll just post a bunch of pictures with a little commentary to cover the past few weeks.

This was a month ago or so in central park. Not a great picture, but a fun one up on a huge rock. I never got them all looking and the sun was making a pretty bad glare, but in every picture from this day Jack is making the same face... fingers pulling his mouth out and his tongue sticking out.

This is how Lillie looks a lot of the time. A hat, a necklace, and a pair of shoes. And in this picture Elliott's paci.

One morning a few weeks ago we collected all of our broken crayons and melted them in the oven to create new crayons. I didn't take an after picture, but you get the idea.

This past Monday was beautiful. A little cool in the shade, but it felt nice and springy in the sun. Since schools are on spring break this week we were able to go to one of our favorite play grounds (it's used during the week for the schools recess). Across the street is a neighborhood garden. We love coming to this garden in the spring and summer. It's like a nice, private, unique space in the middle of a bunch of buildings and busy streets. Right now they are having a tulip festival.

Jack choose to have his picture taken on the bench, no where near any of the pretty flowers.

I tried to get a group shot, but Jack turned his back and the other two followed.

This old wagon/ wheel barrow was in the back corner of the garden and the kids had a lot of fun climbing around on it.

Another attempt at a group shot.

Lillie and Elliott ran up the hill with Jack. This is what they did when they got to our door.

You'll find Lillie in my black high heels a lot.

Elliott finishing up from eating his prized waffles. He loves them!

Today we needed to return some over due library books. I've been putting it off, just could not find the motivation to walk down the the library and "do" the library thing, but today was it.

This is how you'll find Jack a lot of times riding behind the stroller, when he is not walking, with a stick in his hand.

Of course we got the the library at 10:40 and it did not open till 11. They do not have a drop box ( I thought every library had a drop box) so we had to wait for 20 minutes to get in. And yes we did wait, I had no plans on coming back anytime soon.

I planned on just dropping off the over due books and paying my late fee (which only turned out to be 90 cents), but Jack wanted to go look at more books. So we headed up to the children's floor. After being there 5 minutes and looking through books the librarian came out with an Easter craft for all the kids.

They had a good time decorating their eggs and putting a piece of candy in it. You can tell Lillie is trying to get into her candy in this picture instead of decorating the egg.

And she put the stickers on her face, not on the egg.

And I caught Elliott hiding behind the stroller sneaking his chocolate.

We've been out of town quite a bit the past few weeks. We were in Texas the first weekend in April for Passion Ft. Worth. We had a great weekend. Friends from church stayed with our kids. It is a huge blessing to have people we trust our kids with when we need to be out of town for a few days. The same friends came and kept the kids last week while we were in Chicago for a conference. It was a nice time of rest. Not like the relaxing, sit by a pool rest, we were busy both times, but the kind of rest where you're not in charge of anyone else. It was needed.

Before we went to Chicago we made a little detour to TN. Freddy T.'s grandmother passed away and he had the privilege of preaching her funeral. He did a great job and I think she would be pleased with how it all turned out. And of course she would be proud of Freddy T.

In other news, we have a busy next month and a half. We have a lot going on at church this week for Holy Week and are looking forward to the Easter Services. The following weekend Jack and Freddy T. will be in TN for a missions conference and I'll be away at our churches Women's retreat. We're looking forward to spending some good quality time with family toward the end of May and early June. If all goes as planned, we will actually be moving out of our apartment at the end of May. I'll post more about that later, but we are excited to venture into a new neighborhood and area that we are not real, real familiar with, but it is closer to church and we think it will be a great location for our family. We have to be out by the end of May, so Freddy T. will be moving all our stuff while I'm in TN with the kids.

I'm going to get back in blogging mode. I'm so grateful and encouraged by people when they tell me they keep up with us on here. I want to be faithful to keeping it up.

If you made it this far thanks for reading! Hope you are enjoying warm weather where ever you are... and please send it all this way!